Failing Grades Jump at San Francisco’s Top High School After Merit-Based Admissions Replaced by Lottery

The Lowell High School campus in San Francisco, Calif., on Oct. 29, 2020. (David Lam/The Epoch Times)

San Francisco’s Lowell High School, one of the top-performing public schools on the West Coast, has reported a spike in failing grades among students after replacing its academics-based admissions system with a lottery.

Lowell used to be the only school in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) where admissions were determined by a student’s grades and admission test scores, similar to how colleges evaluate their applicants.

In October 2020, the San Francisco Board of Education unanimously voted to enact a lottery-based admissions process for Lowell for the 2021–2022 school year. The decision was made on the basis that eighth graders applying did not have the grade records they needed, due to the fact that SFUSD schools shifted to pass/fail grades, which they said were to accommodate the difficulties that came with COVID-19 lockdowns.

The batch of first-year students admitted to Lowell in fall 2021 through the lottery received triple the number of Ds and Fs than those of the previous two years, according to internal records obtained by The San Francisco Chronicle.

Specifically, some 24.4 percent of Lowell’s 620 first-year students received at least one letter grade of D or F in the fall 2021 semester, according to The Chronicle. Just 7.9 percent of first-year students in fall 2020 and 7.7 percent of first-year students in fall 2019 received a D or an F.

Lowell Principal Joe Ryan Dominguez, who announced in April that he will leave SFUSD at the end of this school year, said the unusually high number of students with failing grades has to do with “many variables,” including remote learning.

“Over a year of distance learning, half of our student body new to in-person instruction at the high school level and absences among students/staff for COVID all explain this dip in performance,” Dominguez told The Chronicle. “It is important not to insinuate a cause on such a sensitive topic at the risk of shaming our students and teachers who have worked very hard in a difficult year.”

That being said, the class of 2025 is not the only group affected by remote learning. The class of 2024, the last batch of students accepted to Lowell through the GPA- and test score-based admission system, started learning remotely in the fall of 2020 and reportedly had only 51 students with D or F grades.

The report comes amid a continued effort by the SFUSD to delay the return of the traditional admission system at Lowell, even after most schools in the district have reopened their buildings for in-person learning.

In December 2021, the Board of Education decided in a 4–3 vote to extend Lowell’s lottery-based admissions for the 2022–2023 school year. On May 20, 2022, Superintendent Matt Wayne introduced a resolution proposing to extend the Lowell lottery for another school year, alongside a resolution to initiate a stakeholder review process for a future admissions process.

Lowell has been a target by racial justice activists for years because of its smaller percentages of black students. Progressive groups, notably the San Francisco and California NAACP, advocated for the end of academics-based admission as a solution to the “exclusion and ongoing toxic racist abuse that students of color, and specifically Black students, have experienced at Lowell High School since the school’s creation.”

According to school data, Lowell’s 2021–2022 student body consisted of 42.4 percent Asians, 25 percent whites, 12.5 percent Hispanics, 1.9 percent blacks, with the rest being multiracial or from other races.